U.S. President: Iran has right to pursue civilian nuclear program

PanARMENIAN.Net - The United States and Russia on Wednesday declared that Iran has a right to pursue a civilian nuclear program, but warned that the country must abide by an international treaty and prove that its contentious efforts were of a "peaceful nature".



"While we recognize that under the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons] Iran has the right to a civilian nuclear program, Iran needs to restore confidence in its exclusively peaceful nature," U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced in a joint statement ahead of their first sit-down.



Striving to ease strained relations, Obama and Medvedev said in their statement that "the era when our countries viewed each other as enemies is long over."



They pledged to work together to limit the world's two largest nuclear arsenals and said they would try to put a new nuclear arms reduction deal in place before the existing treaty expires in December.



The White House also announced that Obama was accepting Medvedev's invitation to visit Moscow this summer.



"Over the last several years, the relationship between our two countries has been allowed to drift," Obama told reporters after his meeting with Medvedev. "What I believe we've begun today is a very constructive dialogue that will allow us to work on issues of mutual interest."



Striking a similar tone with the U.S. president at his side, the Russian

president said: "I am more optimistic of the successful development of our relations."



As for nuclear arms control, the two said in their joint statement that, "We are instructing our negotiators to start talks immediately on this new treaty and to report on results achieved in working out the new agreement by July.



Their newly professed commitment to reinvigorate arms-control initiatives that have lain dormant for years caused a stir at the London site of a G-20 summit that seemed otherwise transfixed on a deepening worldwide recession, Haaretz reported.